Here's what people were talking about on stage and in the
conference halls:

An app for everything may not have been the best for
brands or for consumers. On-stage at the the
Mobile First Summit, Google's vice president of performance
media Jason Spero said
brands have been "too busy" building apps over the past few
years. They put up a mediocre mobile-friendly site that then
directed people to an app — only to see engagement fall off a
ledge except for their most loyal customers. Those brands
have woken up in late 2014 and early 2015 to realize that's
maybe not the best way to reach customers.

Discovering new apps is too hard now.
Currently topping the free apps in the app store are mostly
backed by large corporations, not fledgling startups. "I think
you can't put it in the App Store and wait for it to go," said
Sequoia invest Omar Hammoiu. Research
from Activate also shows that the number of apps people
download and use continues to be the same, despite the massive
(and growing) amount of apps to choose from. Just ask the folks
at Momunt how hard it is to launch an app in 2015. Its CEO
wrote a great walk through of the challenges the app faced
since its March release.

Companies like Google and Facebook are looking to
deep-linking as the new way to move between apps. For
example, if you're looking for a restaurant, you may search to
find the right restaurant, but then want to look at their Yelp
reviews. If a consumer has downloaded an app, Google's
deep-linking will prompt the person to open the app,
rather than forcing them to open it from the phone's home
screen. "If the user has the app on the phone, let them
navigate to the app from wherever they are.... But if they
don't, they shouldn't hit a dead end and have a bad
experience,"
Spero said.

The way we interact with mobile devices may be changing
soon too, says Microsoft's CEO. At the O'Reilly
Summit,
Satya Nadella predicted agents like Cortana (or Apple's
Siri or Google Now or Facebook M) are going to replace the web
browser as a way we interact. To Nadella, the future will
be a lot of people walking around talking to their agents
naturally. "'Hey Cortana' is in my vocabulary. Having that
become more pervasive is my pursuit," Nadella said. For app
developers or mobile companies, that means there will be a wave
of new business models and ways to hook into these
"agents".

For investors, a new investment opportunity is in
back-end development and the next billion. There's
been progress in the front-end of development, but not in the
back-end, said Accel's Rich Wong at the Mobile First Summit. On
stage with app accelerator startup Neumob, one of his
investments, Wong said companies are missing the opportunity to
globalize their product. Google and Facebook have their teams
in-house, but the rest of the apps needs to be thinking about
how they can configure their app to work outside of San
Francisco. The companies that empower this globalization and
capitalize on it are the next big bets.

Overall, everyone agrees mobile phones are here to stay.

However the "app economy" as it was built needs some
restructuring and will eventually change. If we suddenly have
agents, like Facebook's M or Microsoft's Cortana, telling us
where to eat dinner, do we need an app for Yelp? Or will Yelp
turn into a mere mobile website and let these networks of
"agents" (AI-assisted computers) access that information?

This future may be a few years off, despite all the
interest of big companies. After all, there are still
billions of people connecting to the internet for the first time
— and most of them are doing it on their mobile phones over slow
connections. For all the talk of the future, there is still
a lot of work to be done to bring many people into the
present.